1865–1866: (His Hour Has Come: The Great Fire, the Arsenal Explosion, and the Unraveling of Geffrard): Geffrard had disposed of Salnave at great cost — finan…

1865–1866: (His Hour Has Come: The Great Fire, the Arsenal Explosion, and the Unraveling of Geffrard): Geffrard had disposed of Salnave at great cost — financially ruinous, domestically reopening old wounds between North, West, and South — and his transparent exploitation of British gunboat diplomacy to defeat a popular nationalist rebel touched off widespread indignation, for as Dr. Dorsainvil later wrote, “the country had never pardoned Geffrard,” and Minister Peck put the underlying proposition exactly: “The people of Hayti are beyond measure, jealous of foreign interference in their affairs.” Two months after Secretary Seward’s January 1866 visit to Port-au-Prince (the first American cabinet officer ever to visit Hispaniola), (17) disaster struck: on the Feast of St. Joseph, March 19, as Msgr. du Cosquer was celebrating mass, a cry of “Fire!” interrupted the service — a $5 million conflagration centered on today’s Place Geffrard ravaged 30 square blocks including 800 houses and most business establishments in downtown Port-au-Prince, with St. John at pistol point repelling arsonists and reporting that “few except the Europeans cared to exert themselves.” On July 5, Generals Victor Chevallier and Gallumette Michel raised a pronunciamento at Gonaïves, seizing a small war steamer L’Estère, but the revolt was quelled on July 13 when General Léon Montas swept down from the North; within a month, Salnave had emerged from Santo Domingo and was hammering at Mirebalais. Peck’s metaphor that “the excitements which now prevail are bringing the fire fearfully near the magazine” proved literal: on September 18, 1866, at four in the morning, the national arsenal — crammed with 30,000 pounds of powder, loaded shells, grenades, primers, and pyrotechnics — went up like a volcano, bombarding Port-au-Prince with flying projectiles and blowing down 200 houses that had escaped the March conflagration. The serial destruction of Port-au-Prince — fire, explosion, political collapse — represented not mere misfortune but the material manifestation of what Fanon identified as the structural impossibility confronting the postcolonial state: a government simultaneously bankrupted by indemnity payments to the former colonial power, diplomatically humiliated by imperial navies, and internally consumed by the factional politics that colonialism had bequeathed.